Bones Producer Hopeful for a Revival of the Series

It’s the age of remakes, reboots, and when it comes to TV, revivals. This year alone we saw the return of The X-Files, Gilmore Girls, and Full House (as Fuller House), and next year promises to be more of the same with revivals of Prison Break, Twin Peaks and animation like Young Justice on the horizon. What differentiates a revival, though, from other options for resurrection is that all or most of the cast must return, which means it needs to happen sooner rather than later.

There’s no better time than the present to bring back a beloved series, and it seems that’s what the cast and crew of Fox’s departing series Bones are thinking, too. Starring David Boreanaz as FBI Special Agent Seeley Booth and Emily Deschanel as forensic anthropologist Dr. Temperance Brennan, Bones is one of the network’s current crowning achievements after 12 seasons on the air between 2005 and 2017. The twelfth and final season of twelve episodes isn’t actually set to premiere until January, but there’s already hope it could come back in just a few years.

Executive producer Michael Peterson, speaking to TVLine, says he’s confident that Bones will live on in some way or another after this spring’s two-part series finale, mostly because after working on the show for so long no one is ready to let it go. Peterson explains, “I absolutely am not considering this the end. I am in full-on denial. I’ve been working on the show for eight-and-a-half years. It is my family. I adore it here. I don’t want to leave. And the idea of having some kind of reunion in a year or two… I would not rule it out.”

Right now there are currently no plans as to how a return of the show would go. When Bones ends in a few months, Booth, Brennan, and their two kids will likely go off into the sunset together, so it’s not clear what would bring them back for a revival. Peterson agrees, saying: “We haven’t figured out what we’re going to do if it does come back. But I can tell you that 99.9999 percent of the people here would rush to return.”

Where there’s a will there’s a way. Bones wrapped shooting on its last season in early December, and Fox may have decided to hold onto the sets for now. Peterson wouldn’t say one way or the other, only that the question is “a very tricky one to answer” and he doesn’t “know exactly what they’re doing with them.” It sounds very odd for an exec-producer of a show to not know whether the sets were preserved or destroyed, so a Bones revival could be a lot closer to a done deal than any party wants to admit right now. Or maybe, Peterson doesn’t want to say anything, just in case it doesn’t end up happening. We’ll have to wait and see.